Page 19 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

Public Trust, Media, and the "War on Terror" 9

demics.'" This new research archetype took the study of the effects of media
well beyond Presidential elections, though. In their study of media's influence
on television viewers, George Gerbner and Larry Gross discussed the media's
power as the "constructors of [the] social reality" of the American people?
Gerbner and Gross discovered that "the heaviest viewers of television were the
most likely to be 'cultivated' by its patterns of images and accept the television
world view as their vision of reality."8
Gerbner and Gross went further than previous studies, however, in their
assessment that the media's framing of important issues and events goes "be-
yond setting an agenda," as such coverage "activates some ideas, feelings, and
values rather than others" and "can encourage particular trains of thought about
political phenomena and lead audiences to arrive at more or less predictable
concl~sions."~ Progressive scholar and media critic Michael Parenti refers to the
media's power to "invent rea~ity"'~ for its audience, as many consumers of me-
dia place tremendous stock in news outlets' reporting as a serious and accurate
reflection of events in the world around them.
Conclusions about the "agenda setting" power of the media are also rein-
forced in more recent studies of the effects of the media. Two prominent politi-
cal-communications scholars, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, situate
media framing within the context of "episodic" and "thematic" news coverage in
their work: Is Anyone Responsible: How Television Frames Political Issues. As
"episodic" framing typically includes the reporting of specific news events,
"thematic" framing entails more general news trends, such as reporting on pov-
erty, crime, and other general societal trends.
In their experiments on the effects of these two categories of framing, Iyen-
gar and Kinder concluded that their studies "show specifically that television
news powerfully influences which problems viewers regard as the nation's most
serious."" One of the societal "problems" listed by Iyengar and Kinder was
military spending, which is well reflected in the strong rhetorical support of
American political leaders, media pundits, and reporters for increased funding
directed toward the military.
Iyengar and Kinder were clear in their analysis of the importance of news-
frames. The fact that tens of millions of Americans are dependent on television
news to inform them about national and international issues "gives the media an
enormous capacity to shape public thinking."'2 Aside from influencing Ameri-
cans' opinions about what constitute major national problems, the mainstream
media has also been implicated in fomenting particular cultural values. In their
study, "Deep Structures: Polpop Culture on Primetime Television," Allen
McBride and Robert K. Toburen argue that T.V. media cultivates certain "atti-
tudes, values, and world views," as "there is an apparent conservative, yet still
mainstream effect from television viewing, particularly in network news pro-
gramming. Heavy viewers with liberal or Left-leaning politics become more
likely to show evidence of moderating their political views than those with con-
servative or right-leaning politics."'3
McBride and Toburen's study suggests that the media is capable of more
than just getting Americans to think about particular issues or problems. In fact,